1950s

The 1950s were a formative decade in the book’s account of Christian spirituality: amid ministry students’ commitment to social action and the civil rights movement, visits to the Abbey of Gethsemani exposed the author to monastic prayer as a demanding dimension of Christian life. The encounter did not displace social justice concerns; it widened the horizon of a religious vocation and set the author on a lifelong course of study.

Social Action and Civil Rights

In the 1950s, the author’s generation of ministry students regarded social action as central to their vocations and was caught up in the civil rights movement. African American students from Fisk and Tennessee A & I universities were conducting an intense program of sit-ins in downtown Nashville. One classmate trained students in Gandhian nonviolence and was later dismissed from the university for testing segregation laws in the city.

The students faced a conflict between completing their degrees and leaving the university in protest. For various reasons, most stayed. That unresolved tension is essential to the decade’s significance in the book: the turn toward contemplation emerged not as a rejection of public action, but alongside the students’ struggle over how to live out their commitments.

The Monastic Encounter

D. Bard Thompson, a church-history professor at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, took his first-year class each year to spend a day at the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist-Cistercian monastery in Kentucky. The visits were intended to show students studying medieval monasticism that monastic life remained an active institution. Their schedule included the Divine Offices, meals in the guest house, a tour, and an afternoon conversation with a monk. The students were struck by the community’s silence and the monks’ warm spirit.

In the late 1950s, about 250 monks lived there. The author recalled them entering the church silently in white cowls, taking their places in the choir stalls, and singing the psalms in Latin to Gregorian chant after a bell rang. A Protestant seminary student, the author had never experienced anything like it and was deeply moved. Because the trips needed drivers and the author had a car, the author went five times. On two visits, Thomas Merton spent the afternoon with the students, patiently and respectfully answering their questions in a gracious, good-humored manner. The author did not yet know Merton’s standing as a major spiritual writer, but later read and taught most of his books.

The monks’ choice to give up family and careers for poverty, chastity, obedience, and prayer shocked students whose attention was largely directed toward social action. Their presence raised a question the author remembered as a challenge to the students’ assumptions: what did the monks know that they did not? The monastery had made a neglected dimension of Christian life visible without settling the students’ competing obligations.

Prayer and a Lasting Influence

On one visit, a student asked a monk how to develop a deeper prayer life. The monk answered, “Do what we do, pray the Psalms.” The author adopted that advice as a steady practice, returning to the psalms as songs and poems to be explored more deeply. In this small exchange, the monastery’s influence took a form that could continue beyond its walls: not a dramatic experience to reproduce, but a simple discipline of prayer.

The visits also opened the way to sustained study. The author had missed D. Bard Thompson’s course on the history of Christian spirituality, but Thompson agreed to supervise an independent study and assigned readings by many of the writers later discussed in the book. The author’s interest in spirituality and mysticism developed from that beginning, eventually focusing especially on the Cistercian tradition and the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux. Later participation in annual conferences on Cistercian history, including occasional papers and conversations with monks, extended the learning begun on those student trips.

The decade therefore appears as an intersection rather than a conversion from one concern to another. The author retained social-justice commitments and later published a book on the spirituality of social activists, while also developing a deeper longing for God. In retrospect, the 1950s visits to the Abbey of Gethsemani supplied both a concrete encounter with contemplative life and a durable practice of prayer; their significance lay in enlarging the author’s understanding of vocation, not in replacing public concern with monastic withdrawal.